Over on Tiktok, I somehow made a popular (can I say viral?!) video busting some medieval myths. The great thing about this is seeing how many people want to learn more about the Middle Ages – one of the most falsely maligned periods of history. So, this month I’m going to run a joint series here on my blog and on TikTok, giving more detail and reading lists for these myths.
The first one is travel. In my original video, I said:
“even ordinary people would get the chance to travel around in the lifetimes and go abroad on pilgrimages, it’s just that we think of travel as something for rich people as that’s what it became later”
This generated a lot of comments as one of the biggest preconceptions we have about the Middle Ages is that ordinary people were static – they were born in their village and they never left. Well, that’s a big myth and in these captioned videos I explain why:
Prefer to just read?
First of all, a disclaimer that I’m only talking about Western Europe because that’s my specialism.
Our concept of travel is based in tourism, and this comes from the 17th and 18th centuries when noble men would go on a Grand Tour of Europe. What we do is extrapolate this back to assume that just because medieval people didn’t go on holiday for leisure purposes, as in the concept of tourism, they just stayed in their village and never left. But, if you think about your own life pre-Covid, tourism is an extremely small amount of the travelling that you do.
Non-noble types of medieval traveller would have included preachers, mercenaries and soldiers, pilgrims, merchants and their workers, messengers, courts and all the workers who moved with them – so many different kinds!
I’m going to use pilgrimage as an example because it’s probably the closest to what we understand as tourism. If you don’t know what pilgrimage is, it’s basically a journey to visit a holy site, and this was a major form of travel in the Middle Ages.
At an international level, ordinary people would save up to go on a big pilgrimage to, say, Rome or Jerusalem, and this would be like their once-in-a-lifetime, bucket list type holiday. Military orders like the Knights Templar were established to make sure pilgrims got safely to Jerusalem, which shows how many pilgrims there were!
At a national level, ordinary people would travel hundreds of miles to visit holy sites, for example visiting St Thomas Becket’s relics at Canterbury.
Locally, religious festivals which happened every month meant that people would travel to other villages and towns to take part in processions and to visit relics.
So, you can see just in the example of pilgrimage that ordinary people did a lot of travelling in the Middle Ages. We could say the same for other types of travel, too – especially around trade, war, and working for rich people.
Further reading
General
Josephine Livingstone, “Travel, trade and exploration in the Middle Ages”, British Library (2018): https://www.bl.uk/medieval-literature/articles/travel-trade-and-exploration-in-the-middle-ages
Paul Oldfield, “Medieval tourism: pilgrimages and tourist destinations”, History Extra (2012): https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/medieval-tourism-pilgrimages-and-tourist-destinations/
Travel in the Middle Ages collection, Medievalists.net: https://www.medievalists.net/tag/travel-middle-ages/
Specific topics
The Grand Tour of Europe – https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/petworth-house-and-park/features/what-was-the-grand-tour
The Knights Templar – https://www.britannica.com/topic/Templars
St Thomas Becket’s relics – http://thebecketstory.org.uk/canterbury/journeying
Religious festivals in England – http://www.medieval-life-and-times.info/medieval-religion/medieval-religious-festivals.htm
Pilgrimage
An Introduction to Medieval Pilgrimage, The Becket Story: http://thebecketstory.org.uk/pilgrimage
Dee Dyas and John Jenkins (eds.), Pilgrimage and England’s Cathedrals: Past, Present, and Future (2020). You can read a preview on Google Books.
Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage (2011). You can read a preview on Google Books.
Diana Webb, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West (2001).
Brett Edward Whalen, Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Reader (2011). You can read a preview on Google Books.
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Medieval Lauren 